Bureaucracy and Man
Two assumptions underpin a positive view of bureaucracy.
One, the people working inside the bureaucracies come to the job with skills, values, and a personal disposition that enable them to help the organization achieve its goals. These do not change as a consequence of their position.
Two, bureaucracies exist to produce specific, desired, targeted outcomes. This is the primary stated purpose of the organization. It is the shared objective of all who work within the organization.
Both of these assumptions are flawed. They fail in an interconnected fashion.
Bureaucracies change the people who work for them. This has the practical effect on the organization of replacing the stated raison d’etre. Instead, enforcement of the group’s rules and procedures becomes the priority, an end in and of itself. This is one reason why bureaucracies fail.
Consider the agencies established to fight homelessness in California. They have been in business for decades. They have spent countless billions of dollars. The problem appears to be worsening. One wonders what homelessness in California would look like in the absence of such intervenors.
CNN describes the problem.
“California has spent a stunning $17.5 billion trying to combat homelessness over just four years. But, in the same time frame, from 2018 to 2022, the state’s homeless population actually grew. Half of all Americans living outside on the streets, federal data shows, live in California.”
The dominant specific policy assumption behind much of this intervention is that the problem is well-formed: people are homeless because they don’t have homes.
Yet, there is a huge and growing deficit of housing in the Golden State.
Here’s Hoover:
“In the twenty-first century California’s political class has created a whole new category of human silage that is every bit as cruel and barbaric — and arguably more so — as that of the past. Call it “bureaucracy fodder.” The state’s homeless population supports a head-spinning array of head-spinningly well-funded government agencies, nonprofits, charities, foundations, think tanks, law firms, consultants, and developers, all funded and enabled by the state’s (allegedly progressive) political class. As people suffer and die on the streets by the thousands these Brahmins rake in the paychecks, plan scores of multimillion dollar “affordable” and “low income” development projects, hold extravagant galas, and attend posh retreats and “team building” events while clothing themselves in the guise of altruism and community.”
These organizations, staffed by armies of functionaries, fail to reduce homelessness in California. They have failed for years, yet they thrive.
The people who work in these organizations behave rationally, in a sense. Robert K. Merton described this in “Bureaucratic Structure and Personality,” summarized in this piece.
People may come to work for these organizations equipped with skills, values, and motivation, but the milieu in which they operate grinds them into what Merton referred to as the “bureaucratic personality.” The structure of their environment forces them to change. If you want to keep your well-paying job with its high benefits, or if you want to be promoted to a better paying job with improved benefits, then you will do the things that you see people who succeed doing.
The individual infected with the bureaucratic personality virus may have joined to change the world for the better, but they will end up an impersonal, Weberian robot implementing the policies in the organization’s manuals and systems with a rigid indifference to changing circumstances or observed outcomes. The primary objective is to adhere to the authority that promulgates the procedures. The bureaucrat becomes a rule-follower, bereft of creativity, incapable of accepting and reacting to feedback. Merton called this type of behavior “over-conformity.”
An organization made up of such workers exists to extend its influence. Its organic growth comes from having more people and more resources to enforce it rules and to enact its procedures. It does not exist to solve the underlying problem from which it derives its existence. The rules become the ends. If the rules are good, then more enforcement of the rules must be better. It is more important to execute codified procedures than to do something effective. Conformity is counter-productive, but that’s beside the point.
Bureaucracies drive conformity. They overshoot.
Entrepreneurs do not go into government. If they do, it’s bred out of them or they leave with a piquant experience that drives a lifelong antipathy to authority.
What corollary implications can we draw from Merton’s bureaucratic personality type?
Theory: Organizations could benefit from a “fail-fast” mentality. If an agency is not having a palpable positive impact on the problem they have been established to address and there is little evidence of creative, fluid, trial-and-error in their approach to the target issue, then governance bodies should assume that the staff has been overcome by Merton’s “over-conformity” and that the organization needs to be reconstituted with a fresh mandate and new staff. This is tricky. In some cases, especially when the problems are large or persistent. It may be difficult to distinguish between a failed approach and insufficient time-on-task.
Keep in mind that this applies to private sector organizations, as well. One simplistic view of business is that there are two kinds of activity: exploration and exploitation. In exploration activities, firms try out new products to see if there is sufficient demand for a novel good or service that the company can satisfy, leading to the expected generation of free cash. Once they have found a product that fits the bill, the enterprise then seeks to ramp it up to its largest feasible scale, at which point the company switches to exploiting the opportunity, milking the cash cow for as long as possible. In the exploitation phase of the product lifecycle, particularly for products with high cash generating capacity, the staffing of the division (or, worse, the company) can fall prey to defensive, over-conformity. Policies and procedures replace the creativity and risk-taking that created the opportunity to exploit, all in the name of protecting the Golden Goose. This is fine, as long as it does not infect the broader organization with the bureaucratic personality, reducing the incentives and the culture that exploration requires. Growth attenuates.
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
Bureaucracy suffers from a failure of human factors engineering. It does not account for the impact of the system on the individual and the way in which this dynamic feeds back on itself.